Iceberg - Where Does Our Pure Fresh Water Come From

Iceberg – The Purity of Fresh Water

Recently, I have been watching an interesting coin of documentary about icebergs and wanted to share with you the knowledge that I have gathered from it. In this piece, I will focus my attention as to how important of a role icebergs play within our environment; its dangerousness and its benefits that we flourish from everyday without even knowing it, perhaps some of us do.

So what is an iceberg? It is a piece of large mass of ice that is made from a snow that floats in the water. Icebergs come from the artic and are broken off from a so-called ice shelf also referred to as a glacier.

Over thousands of years, the snow that gathers there on a piece of land form a glacier that then breaks off and floats into the water. As they float in the artic capes they slowly melt streaming downward its purity into the rivers that we then consume. Icebergs also strike the bottom of the ocean. This takes place when powerful winds push icebergs towards the shore and they therefore get stuck in shallow waters â€“ these are areas such as seabed and reefs.

Experts say that a typical iceberg is approximately 10,000 years old and each year there are anywhere from 35,000 to 50,000 icebergs floating in our waters. Overall, icebergs tend not to have a condition of speed and/or how fast they float as it all depends of the weather, the wind, as well as the size of the iceberg and the way it is shaped. Icebergs float at the speed of 4 to 5 kilometres a year, however, the ones of western Greenland apparently flow 6 to 7 kilometres a year what makes them the fastest icebergs floating in the water in the world.

Did you know that only 10% of an iceberg is above the water? So we can only see the tip of it and under the water the width is about 25 to 30 percent bigger than one can see at the surface level. In fact, an iceberg can vary in size â€“ the largest can weigh about 11 million tonnes while the smallest can weigh at 80,000 tons. Smaller icebergs are more dangerous in the waters because it is more difficult for ships to notice them and apparently the radar does not catch them from time to time especially when waters are wavy. Since most of us know the famous tale of Titanic, an iceberg was the one that sunk the so-called â€œunsinkable shipâ€ which happen to be one of the greatest tragedies in the worldâ€™s history that took place in the year of 1912. Having said that, the ice of an iceberg is close to 11% as hard as metal so in this case if a ship of any kind was to collide with an iceberg â€“ the force of the iceberg would destroy it instantly.

Icebergs are in fact very dangerous when you come close to them as they break off easily so it is best to avoid them at a greater distance in the water. When the ice of the iceberg cracks it breaks off into little pieces that fly in all different directions in the air and can hit an object anytime so ships are warned not to be in close distance of it. The most dangerous of it is that because the majority of the iceberg is underwater it poses a threat to the bottom of the ship as it may hit and/or cut right through it as we saw in the Oscar nominee movie entitled â€œTitanicâ€ staring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

Interestingly, the iceberg is very dangerous to humans as we approach it as an object in a close distance but it is safe to consume, to swallow and to drink. Did you also know that the icebergs are not salty? The melted water from an iceberg is the purest from all to drink as it comes from snow and fresh water that is formed in the artic. There is no pollution in the artic â€“ that part of the world still remains the purest for mankind.